Thanks for your thoughtful response! Brown v. Board of Education is definitely the most well-supported case of the three, and you might be right; perhaps it's

Thanks for your thoughtful response! Brown v. Board of Education is definitely the most well-supported case of the three, and you might be right; perhaps it's fully justified by the 14th Amendment. I have trouble seeing how the Court got from the reasoning in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (most professional schools need to be integrated so that minorities can learn their professions from people who are currently working in their field) to the sweeping declaration in Brown that all segregated schools in all circumstances are inherently illegal, but that's a relatively minor quibble, and I should have looked for a better example. The problem with the 9th Amendment argument for rights like privacy is that just because the rights exist doesn't mean the federal government is entrusted with protecting those rights, much less affirmatively defining their scope in cases where the extent of the right is hotly contested. It doesn't make much sense to file a federal lawsuit to stop a state government from implementing state abortion laws that were duly approved a majority of the state's voters, including women. It makes even less sense for the Supreme Court to then lay out (as it did in Roe v. Wade) a detailed regulatory scheme explaining exactly when a fetus should be treated as a person. Even if you approve of Roe v. Wade's trimester scheme, there's no common sense way to get from "Americans probably have some kind of right to privacy" to "According to the Constitution, here's which fetuses are viable." Similarly, I support gay marriage, but I can't find a right to gay marriage in the constitution as it's currently written. The Obergefell court wasn't even pretending to interpret any particular part of the Constitution -- instead, the Court just asserted that "The identification and protection of fundamental rights is an enduring part of the judicial duty to interpret the Constitution" and that "it requires courts to exercise reasoned judgment in identifying interests of the person so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect." If you trust the nine members of the Supreme Court to "exercise reasoned judgment" on behalf of the whole country to figure out what's moral, then that's fine...but that's not a democratic way of doing things.